Colombo conducts ‘fake’ conference in Ki’linochchi

[TamilNet, Monday, 24 May 2010, 19:27 GMT]
Northern government department and corporation key officials urgently directed by their superiors to attend a conference Monday in Ki’linochchi in Vanni to discuss resettlement of people uprooted due to war in North were disillusioned to find that the conference failed to address the issues meant, participants in the conference said. The conference, attended by several key ministers including Wimal Weeravansa and Douglas Devananda besides many parliamentarians from the South, revealed the glaring absence of essential matters like allocation of funds for resettlement or definite plans for resettlement, the sources added. Colombo government has enacted another ‘drama’ to show the world that it is able to convene a conference in Ki’linochchi town just as the Liberation Tigers had done in their days, political circles in North said.
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'Pardoning' Tissainayagam delayed

[TamilNet, Sunday, 23 May 2010, 17:10 GMT]
Sri Lankan 'presidential pardon' granted to senior journalist J.S.Tissainayagam is delayed due to the withdrawal of his appeal from the law court, claimed Sri Lankan Foreign External Affairs Minister G.L.Peiris to Colombo media Friday.
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Congressman's war crimes call to Clinton to dog Peiris's visit

[TamilNet, Saturday, 22 May 2010, 20:39 GMT]
Congressman Steve Driehaus (D-OH), a senior member of the United States National Security and Foreign Affairs Committee, in a letter to US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, asked her to "urge the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to conduct an investigation into reported human rights violations," in Sri Lanka. The Congressman points out in the letter that "[t]he pain assoicated with this [Sri Lanka's] conflict was further exacerbated as a result of alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious crimes committed during the final phase of the Sri Lanka's civil war." Sri Lanka’s External Affairs Minister G.L.Peiris is expected to visit the US this week, and his visit and his meeting with State Department officials are widely believed to be on accountability issues of Sri Lanka's war crimes, according to knowledgeable sources in Washington.
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Taking stock on the first anniversary of Internationally abetted genocide

[TamilNet, Saturday, 22 May 2010, 14:07 GMT]
The Tamil struggle for independence, one of the longest running struggles of Asia, which has progressed through the Colonial phase and the World Wars, through Cold-War era and through the period of War on Terrorism and the times of economic conquest, now stands at the juncture of a paradigm shift, one-year after the end of asymmetric, but largely conventional Eezham War IV. If Eezham Tamil Nation is to advance successfully forward from where it stands, it needs to adopt its own set of paradigms, capable of not only defeating opposing maneuvers of the Sri Lankan state and the abettors from outside, but also powerful in addressing the future from a broad perspective, rising above the classical dialectic approach.
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Peiris US bound amid war crime calls in US Congress

[TamilNet, Friday, 21 May 2010, 23:30 GMT]
Sri Lanka’s External Affairs Minister G.L.Peiris is to visit the United States next week for talks with the US government, and is expected to meet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during his stay in US, Colombo electronic media reported quoting External Affairs Ministry sources. The hurriedly arranged visit occurs in the wake of a week of concerted calls by several human rights organizations for independent investigations into Sri Lanka war crimes. Congressmen David Price (D-4th District North Carolina) and Danny K Davis (D-7th District Illinois) added their voices for expeditious action by the international community to probe into war crimes in Sri Lanka. Three more Congresspersons made floor statements referring to traditional Tamil homeland and Tamils as a community under threat, and on the condition of Tamil refugees.
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Jaffna SLA blocks efforts to reopen schools, government buildings closed due to war in North

[TamilNet, Friday, 21 May 2010, 17:05 GMT]
A conference is to be held Monday in Ki’linochchi to discuss the reopening of the schools in Vanni which remain closed due to war as the government of Sri Lanka shows that it is trying to restore normalcy in the North, sources in Ki’linochchi said. Meanwhile, the Ministries of Public Administration and Defence are to conduct a conference in Colombo soon to explore ways to reopen the schools and government buildings that are being occupied in the North for ten to twenty years. Jaffna SLA Commander, however, is said to be hindering this move as the opening of the schools and government buildings will call for the resettlement of the people uprooted from Valikaamam North, sources Jaffna said.
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Tamil Nadu Film society to shun IIFA Festival in Colombo

[TamilNet, Friday, 21 May 2010, 11:06 GMT]
Tamil Nadu Film society in its joint statement to media Wednesday said that it has decided to shun the India International Film Awards (IIFA) Weekend Festival to be held in Colombo in June first week for three days. “The death wails of the Tamils killed in the massacre of Tamils in Sri Lanka last year still echoes in the hearts of the Tamils in the world and Sri Lanka should not conduct the film festival while the Tamils mourn,” the statement said.
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106 schools closed, 60000 students deprived of education in north

[TamilNet, Friday, 21 May 2010, 08:13 GMT]
At least sixty thousand children are deprived of their education after the war that concluded last year due to the closure of 106 schools in Ki'linochchi, Mullaiththeevu, Thu'nukkaai, Vavuniyaa North and Mannaar. Nearly 62,944 uprooted persons from Vanni are still detained in internment camps in Vavuniyaa, parliamentarian of the main opposition United National Party (UNP) Thursday claimed at a media briefing held in Colombo.
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Colombo steps up Sinhalicisation in Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 19 May 2010, 15:00 GMT]
Colombo's district land authority has taken a move to allocate four hundred acres of state land with beach frontage, along the beach of north of Trincomalee district to Sinhalese businessmen of the south in the name of 'tourist development' despite the Tamil speaking villagers of Kuhchchave'li, I'rakka'ndi and Kumpu'ruppiddi in the Kuchchave'li DS division had already made representation to the civil authority to allocate these lands for their residential and occupational purposes.
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Accounting for 2009 will define Sri Lanka’s future - editorial

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 18 May 2010, 11:10 GMT]
“2009’s single, protracted program of state-conducted slaughter in Sri Lanka has a sixty year-long antecedent, beginning well before the armed conflict erupted in 1983 … Since independence from Britain the Tamils have been a clear target for state-sanctioned and, later, state-conducted violence on a massive scale. … In that sense, the Tamils today embody the raison d’etre of the ‘responsibility to protect,” the Tamil Guardian newspaper argued in its latest editorial.
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Colombo, SLA 'poking spear into an unhealed wound' : JUSU

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 18 May 2010, 10:17 GMT]
Sri Lanka government and its army celebrating their Vanni war victory in the the North and East while the Tamils continue to suffer bearing the wounds inflicted by Sri Lanka Army (SLA) in Vanni is like ‘poking spear into an unhealed wound’, Jaffna University Students Union (JUSU) said in a media message titled Monday in Jaffna. Meanwhile, SLA key officials took part in several ‘Victory Celebrations’ held in Vanni mainland while people travelling along A9 road were kept waiting on sides for nearly four hours Monday while SLA conducted its celebration event in Ki’linochchi, sources in Jaffna said.
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NESoHR: Except Dublin, world remains without action on Colombo's War Crimes

[TamilNet, Monday, 17 May 2010, 09:09 GMT]
"For the last one year, there has only been talk of war crime charges. Repeated attacks on hospitals; killing, torture, rape and sexual abuse of people escaping the war zone are some of the charges leveled against the Sri Lankan forces. But, except for the verdict passed by the Dublin Permanent People’s Tribunal there has been no other concrete action," said the exiled team members of the North East Secretariat on Human Rights (NESoHR), the Humanitarian body which was earlier based in Vanni, in a statement issued Monday. "The 300,000 people who walked out of the war zone are witnesses to these war crimes. Each one of them would have narrowly escaped death at least once in those safe zones. Fear, extreme fear, prevents the 300,000 eye witnesses from speaking. Even those who escaped from the island to other countries are silenced by fear."
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Sri Lanka responsible for mass killings - ICG

[TamilNet, Monday, 17 May 2010, 01:24 GMT]
The report by International Crisis Group, a Europe based NGO, said that despite its [Colombo’s] promises to protect civilians and aid workers as it made its assault on the Tigers, the Sri Lankan government had bombed relentlessly in areas where it knew unarmed people were present, according to the Monday edition of New York Times. “Evidence gathered by Crisis Group provides reasonable grounds to believe that during these months [the security forces intentionally and repeatedly shelled civilians, hospitals and humanitarian operations,” the paper said quoting from the text of the ICG report, and added that “[i]t [the report] also provides reason to believe that senior government and military officials were aware of the massive civilian casualties due to the security forces’ attacks, but failed to protect the civilian population as they were obliged to under the laws of war.”
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SLA tears down Tamil Heroes memorial monuments in VVT

[TamilNet, Sunday, 16 May 2010, 15:28 GMT]
More than a hundred Sri Lanka Army (SLA) soldiers deployed Sunday evening in Theeruvil in Valveddiththu’rai, the birth place of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader V. Pirapaharan in Vadamaraadchi, are tearing down the memorial monuments erected in memory of twelve combatants including senior Commanders Kumarappa, Pulenthiran and another memorial monument of Col. Kiddu, sources in Valveddiththur’ai (VVT) said. Meanwhile, former TNA parliamentarian Sivajilingam told that he too had received complaints about the demolishing of LTTE memorial monuments.
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Resettlement of uprooted civilians remains rejected in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Saturday, 15 May 2010, 11:05 GMT]
The civilians uprooted from Valikaamam in Vadamaraadchi by occupying Sri Lanka Army (SLA) converting their lands into High Security Zone (HSZ) 20 years ago have lost all hopes despite repeated promises and announcements made by government ministers, officials and Jaffna SLA Commander as SLA authorities continue to deny permission for resettlement, according to A.C. Nadarajah, one of nearly a hundred thousand uprooted persons in Jaffna peninsula. Mr. Nadarajah, a former principal, social activist and the present manager of ‘Yarl Thinakural’ in Jaffna, leads one of the welfare organizations for uprooted civilians in Jaffna peninsula. "It is obvious that the main reason for this predicament is the adamancy of the SLA to vacate the lands and properties confiscated from thousands of families in Jaffna peninsula," Mr. Nadarajah told journalists in Jaffna.
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Thought crime, torture and kingly fiat

[TamilNet, Saturday, 15 May 2010, 03:22 GMT]
“Tissainayagam’s pardon is clearly an act of Sri Lanka’s international diplomacy, an act made possible by the complete absence of the rule of law as an operating principle in its legal system,” writes a columnist in the Tamil Guardian newspaper. “[While] the legal system’s ability to convict Tissainayagam on the basis of a confession obtained under torture on charges that amount to accusations ‘thought crime’ reveal that Sri Lanka has fully departed from the principles of the rule of law […] the Presidential pardon echoes medieval forms of justice dispensed as royal patronage and is in keeping with Sinhala leaders’ proclivity for styling themselves as mythical Sinhala rulers.”
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Mahinda Rajapakse leaves to Iran to accept G-15 chairmanship

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 May 2010, 15:11 GMT]
President Mahinda Rajapaksa is to leave Colombo on Sunday to attend the forthcoming G-15 Summit to be held in Tehran on Monday. He is to take over the Chairmanship of the G-15 from the incumbent chairman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, according to Colombo External Affairs Ministry.
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Lest We Forget: Children affected by Genocidal War Crimes of Colombo

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 May 2010, 04:01 GMT]
Tamils all over the world mark 18 May as Genocidal War Crimes Day, observing one year remembrance of thousands who perished in the war, waged by the Sri Lankan state and its abettors, on the de-facto state of Tamil Eelam. Despite its repeated pledges to the International Community, the Sri Lankan state and its military machine vowing to erase 'separatism demand' from Tamils for generations, to turn heavy arms on civilian population claiming the lives of thousands of children and women in addition to depriving them of food, medicine and medical evacuation on time. The conduct of the Sri Lankan state, which disregarded all norms of humanity in the war, has posed a civilisational question, and justice remains undelivered. TamilNet releases 14 of 512 photos taken by a humanitarian worker to mark the Genocidal War Crimes Day.
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Pirapaharan's mother admitted to VVT hospital in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Thursday, 13 May 2010, 12:24 GMT]
Parvathi Velupillai, mother of LTTE leader Velupillai Pirabaharan, has been admitted to the Valdveddiththu'rai (VVT) hospital in Jaffna, Wednesday evening. Parvathi amma, denied entry to Tamil Nadu and deported back to Malaysia earlier, was brought down to Sri Lanka earlier this week and stayed at a lodge in Colombo in a bedridden state.
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Panadura North police assaults Sinhala resident, victim denied justice

[TamilNet, Thursday, 13 May 2010, 11:04 GMT]
A 32-year-old Sinhala resident of Panadura, south of Colombo, was dragged from his house on May 02 and was beaten unconscious by Panadura North Police. The police did not show any warrant or informed the victim of the complaint. The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) on Thursday said: "Although the hospital arranged for a report by a Judicial Medical Officer and hospital police took a statement, the magistrate who saw him after his discharge asked for neither and remanded him. He was not allowed to collect his prescribed medicine from the hospital. The victim has been released on bail but his wife's complaints against the police have reportedly not been responded to by the authorities. The family fears further intimidation."
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